STEUBENVILLE — First Fridays on Fourth will finish out the 2025 street festival season Friday with what organizers hope will be a celebration to remember.

This month’s theme is Oktoberfest, Marc Barnes of the Harmonium Project said.

“One of the most exciting things this month is we’ll have not one, but two breweries coming out,” Barnes said. “One of them, Birdfish Brewing, is coming from Columbiana — they’ll do some traditional German festival beers. We’re very excited for that. Hightower Brewing will be here, too, as usual, and they’re bringing their Festbier. We’ll probably do a long, long table down Fourth Street to imitate the beer tables in traditional beer halls at German Oktoberfests.”

There will also be music — plenty of it, including a polka band, Down Und Kraut, playing some traditional polka music,” Barnes said. Dear Other, a band of Steubenville locals — including himself — also will perform.

“And Mark Nelson is bringing his apple press,” he added. “He’ll be crushing apples on the spot, doing fresh-pressed cider right there on Fourth Street.”

There will be live judo and karate demonstrations as well as a battle of wills: Barnes said students from the College of St. Joseph the Worker threw the gauntlet down, challenging their counterparts from the Franciscan University of Steubenville to a tug-of-war in the street.

“We’ll also have bouncey castles and street musicians sprinkled throughout the festival area,” he added. “The bookmobile will be there, along with a lot of the normal vendors, great local food trucks, local woodworkers selling gifts and crafts and games for kids.”

He said it’s been a good First Friday season, but he said it’s bittersweet.

“It’s a mix of emotions,” he said. “Downtown is going to revitalize if we can continue these events. The part of it that’s sad is because we always want to keep working for downtown revitalization, making downtown a really attractive place to be and do business. But after October, we kind of hand the baton off to the Steubenville Cultural Trust, which runs the Nutcracker Village. It’s really great to know we’re not the only people working on bringing these events downtown, that it really is a large community effort to make downtown Steubenville beautiful, safe and an exciting place to be.

If there’s one thing the 2025 season taught him, he said, it’s “that I need more volunteers.”

“We’ve also learned that, we’re continually learning, that the model works,” he said. “All of the businesses that have opened up in downtown Steubenville report much higher sales during First Fridays with sales numbers that often make the difference between being able to run their business downtown vs. not. As a new business owner myself (Steubenville Grocery Box), I’ve found that to be the case — they don’t just look forward to the fun of First Fridays, but they look forward to the economic prosperity that it brings. It’s important for us to remember as we revitalize our city, we can’t do it without bringing a large number of people to downtown.”

And despite some up-and-down weather at the start of the season, he said turnouts have been strong and consistent — and even on the rainy days, “everyone was such a trooper, they waited it out and came back again so even with bad weather, we’ve had consistent crowd sizes. It felt full from block to block.”